Dear All,
We working in combinat have a problem of naming convention which is likely to
concern everyone in sage. As you can guess, in combinatorics we like to count
sets an iterate through them. So we designed some objects called for now
CombinatorialClass which represent a finite or countable set sorted in a
particular order (eg the permutations of 4 in the lexicographic order). Such a
set can be counted and iterated through.
My question is the following: we are looking for a good name for the method
which returns the number of element of a set S.
Note that we will widely implement this method for sets which can be of any
combinatorial use, including for example the sets of natural numbers N, the
finite rings and fields Z/pZ, any finite groups. So we want the name to be
consistent through all sage.
Until now we use len(S) but this is bad because in python specification
__len__ must returns a python int, whereas we want to have an arbitrary large
integer and even +infinity:
object.__len__(self)
Called to implement the built-in function len(). Should return the
length of the object, an integer >= 0.
We were going to use s.count() until someone pointed out than there is a
collision with a standard python methods for list.
s.count(x)
return number of i‘s for which s[i] == x
Other suggestion are:
- s.length() : this is more ore less coherent with data structures but
seems to me to be too far from the mathematical thinking;
- s.cardinality() : we don't like it because this is too long. Remember that
we will type it every two lines;
- s.card() is currently my favorite...
Sorry for asking a question and giving at the same time my opinion. But I'd
like this decision to be taken as soon as possible: there are a bunch of patch
waiting only this answer...
If you also have any suggestion for CombinatorialClass which was good in MuPAD
when (object oriented) class where called domains but which is now too much
confusing... Thanks for your help and comments.
Cheers,
Florent
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